For a moment Gallows fought to try to break the hold, and to drag his opponent headlong from his horse, by kicking Adam’s animal stoutly in the flank. But Adam was inflicting such an agony upon him as he could not endure. They broke away, only to rush for the third time, back to this giant wrestling.
“The fool will never learn. I shall kill him yet!” cried Rust to himself, for he went for Gallows’s neck as before and got it again in his hold.
He threw a tremendous strength into the struggle. Gallows let out a bellow. Releasing the reins, he threw both his arms about his foe and deliberately fell from his seat, with the intention of crushing Rust beneath his weight, on the ground.
Adam’s turn in the air was the work of the expert wrestler. The horses shied nervously away.
The two were up on their feet and telescoped abruptly in one compact, struggling mass, as if two malleable statues of heroic size had suddenly been bent and intertwisted together.
With his ox-like force Gallows began to force Adam backward. Adam let him expend himself in this manner for a moment. He then discovered the great hulk’s design. He meant to force the rover to where Garde was still lying, and so to trample upon her till the life should be stamped and ground from her helpless form.
Randolph had sent him to commit this final infamy.
The rage that leaped up in Adam’s breast was a terrible thing. He feinted to drop as if in exhaustion. Gallows loosened his hold to snatch a better one, at once. In that second Adam dealt him a blow in the stomach that all but felled him where he stood.
Before he could straighten to recover, Rust was upon him like a tiger. Getting around the great brute’s side, he threw both hands around the short, thick neck and twisted himself into position so that he and Gallows were placed nearly back to back. Then with one movement he lifted at the man’s whole weight, with the monster’s head as a lever, hauled fiercely backward. Into the action he threw such a mighty rush of strength that Gallows was hoisted bodily off the ground, for a second, and then his neck gave forth a tremendous snap and was broken so fearfully that one of the jagged ends of a vertebra stabbed outward through the flesh, and dripped with red.
The whole dead weight of the fellow’s carcass rested for a second on Rust’s back and shoulder, and then Adam let him fall to the ground, where, like a slain hog, he rolled heavily over and moved no more.